Re: POV-RED: The Geonomist

[Jeffery J SMITH <geonomist@juno.com>]

Hi, Male (is that a Mayan name?);

On Wed, 22 Jan 2003 12:13:08 -0600 rorac <rorac@laneta.apc.org> writes:
> SMITH, Jeffery J.
>       I've read your article with a lot of interest! This is my 
> working place in
> México. To keep the land property in hands of more than a million 
> peasants,
> in the system called Ejidos. This is only posible, through education 
> first,
> and gouvermental support. There is Fox program for the second, but
> education and educators is the hard part! I send you a paper 
> explaining it
> broader.

Many thanks for your article. It was quite inspiring.

When I lived in Mexico, I visited an ejido as a guest of the local
government. What an experience! People feared normalizing their property
because they worried that the official record would make their homes and
fields less secure, not more. They negotiated heavily with my guide, the
head of the cadastre.

Another time, after some charitable Northamericans delivered some medical
aid and built a clinic, one of the peasant fathers remarked that more
than doctors, what had saved their children from the diseases caused by
hunger was farmers getting their own land. Landlessness still seems to
persist in some places. Mexican TV news once showed the police gunning
down 17 unarmed peasants on a country road as they rode into town to a
political demonstration for land rights.

In Baja California, Mexicali and other towns have begun shifting their
property tax off buildings, onto land, with good results. When owners pay
more tax for land, not for improvements, then they quit speculating and
start investing in new construction. Everybody benefits. Every place that
has raised the tax on land has (by ending speculation) put land into the
hands of more people.

Here's an article of mine in Spanish that one of the Mexican papers
published.

Keep up the good work. Let's explore ways to network concretely. Ciao.

SMITH, Jeffery J.
President, Geonomy Society, www.progress.org/geonomy
Share Earth's worth to prosper and conserve.

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